Be this as it may, to return to the system of which we were speaking, even if I were at liberty to divulge its secret I should not do so. I am not a very austere moralist and I look upon gambling as one of those profoundly human evils which we shall never be able to uproot and which, for all our efforts, will always reappear in a new form. Still, the least that we can do is not to encourage it. The gambler, I mean the inveterate, almost professional gambler, is not interesting. To begin with, he is an idler and nearly always a part of the world’s flotsam, with no justification for his existence. If he be rich, he is making the most foolish, the most dismal use of his money that can be imagined. If he be poor, he is even less easily to be forgiven: he should know better than to sacrifice his days and too often the welfare and the peace of mind of those dependent on him to a will-o’-the-wisp. Underlying the gambler we find too often a sluggard, an incompetent, a boneless egoist, greedy of vulgar and unmerited pleasures, a dissatisfied and inefficient individual. Gambling is the stay-at-home, imaginary, squalid, mechanical, anæmic and unlovely adventure of those who have never been able to encounter or create the real, necessary and salutary adventures of life. It is the feverish and unhealthy activity of the wastrel. It is the purposeless and desperate effort of the debilitated, who no longer possess or never possessed the courage and patience to make the honest, persevering effort, the unspasmodic, unapplauded effort which every human life demands. There is also a great deal of puerile vanity about the gambler. Taken for all in all, he is a child still seeking his place in the universe. He has not yet realized his position. He thinks himself peerless in the face of destiny. In his self-infatuation he expects the unknown or the unknowable to do for him what it does not do for any one whomsoever. And he expects this for no reason, simply because he is himself and because others have not that privilege. He must tempt fate incessantly, hurriedly, anxiously, in I know not what idle and pretentious hope of learning to know himself from without. Whatever fortune’s decision may be, he will find cause for preening himself. If he have no luck, he will feel flattered because he is specially persecuted by fortune; if he be lucky, he will think all the more highly of himself because of the exceptional gifts which she bestows upon him. For the rest, he does not need to believe that he deserves these gifts; on the contrary, the less right he has to them, the prouder he will be of them; and the unjust and manifestly undeserved chance which makes them his will form the best part of the vainglorious satisfaction which he will contrive to extract from them. 15